Shared electronic documents, forums, folders and threads (collectively, “documents”) facilitate the exchange of ideas and information via a network. Network collaboration tools enable multiple users to access and contribute to a given document. Documents may be represented in a directory arranged according to subject matter to help computer users to locate documents of interest. Once a document of interest is located, a copy of or link to the document may be provided to a user's computer in response to an addressed request message such as a Uniform Resource Locator (“URL”), and the user may submit modifications which are saved in a master copy of the document stored on a source device such as a server. The modifications may then be viewed by other users who access the master copy.
Early implementations of shared network documents and collaboration tools required that documents be accessed manually. The user would prompt retrieval of a copy of the document from the server each time the user wished to view a particular document in order to determine whether the document had been modified. The user could then read the document to identify modifications. However, the user might not become aware of a change in a timely manner unless the document was frequently retrieved and read. This was recognized to be time consuming and inefficient.
It is now known to use subscriptions to provide notifications of updates. In particular, a user may submit a request for a subscription to a document so that a notification is sent to the user each time the document is changed. However, managing subscriptions can also be time consuming. For example, different collaboration tools may implement subscriptions in different ways, and a subscription tool may not be readily accessible from the document. Further, some collaboration tools provide only relatively broad subscriptions which tend to result in an undesirably great number of email updates to be sent to a subscriber.